he looked up, the blue eyes that had reassured Brenda in Josh’s room had taken on a much more somber cast. “In cases like Josh’s, I think it’s important to make the whole experience as nonthreatening as possible. But I don’t want you to think for a moment that I was making light of what happened.”
Brenda lowered herself into the chair, finally allowing herself to release the tension that had been building in her from the minute she’d discovered Josh in his room. Until this moment, she realized, she had been dealing with the situation more on pure instinct than on any sort of rational thought. Now, as the sheer terror drained away, she found herself trembling. “I—I just can’t believe it happened,” she said, her voice a murmur, as if she was speaking more to herself than to the doctor. “I knew he was unhappy—I mean, he didn’t even want to go to school this morning—but I thought it was just first-day jitters—you know, what with being in a new class and all.” As Hasborough’s brows knitted in puzzlement, Brenda rushed to explain how Josh had been skipped a grade for the second time, how difficult it was for him to be so much younger and smaller than his classmates, how cruel the bigger kids could sometimes be.
How much she worried about him.
Then, a terrible thought struck her. “Am I going to have to send him away, Dr. Hasborough?” she whispered. “I mean, to a hospital or something?”
The doctor frowned and held up a cautionary hand. “Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, all right? For now, I think I’d like to keep him here overnight, just to keep an eye on him and try to get some idea of how he’s feeling. It would help if I knew exactly what’s been going on the last few days.”
For the next fifteen minutes Brenda slowly pieced together the story of what had happened that day, nervously answering Hasborough’s probing questions about Josh’s behavior during the last few weeks of summer vacation, and concluding with a sigh, “All I can tell you is he didn’t want to go back to school. But most kids his age don’t, do they?” Her question held a plaintive note, as if she was pleading with the doctor to offer her at least a scrap of evidence that Josh wasn’t crazy.
“Well, I sure never wanted to go back to school when I was ten,” Hasborough agreed, his reassuring smile returning. “And from what you’ve told me, it doesn’t sound as though Josh’s stunt with the knife was premeditated. It sounds as though he was just really upset about everything, and mad at you, and he found a way of getting your attention.”
Brenda took a deep breath, but her relief lasted only an instant. “But what does it mean?” she asked as a horrifying new thought assaulted her. “Will he … could he try it again?”
For a long time the doctor remained silent, as if reluctant to tell her the truth. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “But it seems to me we’ve got to find some answers for him.” He’d deliberately used the word “we” when he spoke, and he was relieved to see her relax slightly, as if the fact of no longer feeling totally alone with her problems made them seem more manageable. He had already ascertained that Brenda MacCallum had no one to whom she could turn— not her parents, certainly not her ex-husband. And it seemed clear that Eden School could provide no real help. His suspicion on that score was confirmed when he asked Brenda what the school had advised.
“Score one for Mr. Hodgkins,” Brenda remarked, rummaging in her purse for the pamphlet the school’s principal had given her that afternoon. “This was his big idea.” She placed the pamphlet on the desk. “Can you believe it? How am I supposed to send Josh to someplace like that?” She clasped her hands tightly together to control their shaking—whether with anger of fear, she did not know—and watched the doctor nervously as he studied the brochure.
Richard Hasborough made no reply, merely shaking his head, a gesture that Brenda instantly took for agreement with her own judgment of Hodgkins’s suggestion. “Dumb, huh?”
Hasborough looked up. “Dumb? No, not at all.”
Brenda felt her jaw slackening. “You mean you know about this place?”
“I sure do. It’s attached to the university where my wife went to school. She used to work with some of their kids once